"But there is nothing out there," a middle-aged dropka pointed out, confusion on his leathery face. "Nothing but wilderness. Nothing that could be used against us."
"The howlers would call them olds," Shan said, and he saw several of the Tibetans cringe. "Old herbal beds once used by the lamas. Holy sites used by the lamas from Rapjung. That is what Padme is destroying. We took him to Rapjung and he destroyed the buildings there." He paused as Lhandro explained the terrible night at Rapjung when the reconstruction had been reduced to ashes. They had been wrong about the dobdob, Shan knew now. The dobdob must have stopped Padme, beaten him because he had found the monk trying to burn the herbs. He remembered Padme's reaction when he had seen the reconstructed shrines at the old gompa. He had read reports, Padme had said. He meant Public Security and howler reports. It meant the dobdob was trying to stop the howlers, trying to stop the destruction of the herbs. The dobdob, protector of the virtuous, must have been Jokar's companion, the one they had seen in the meadow with Jokar, the one who was now missing.
Gyalo stepped forward to explain what he had seen inside Norbu. Finally Nyma stood up and quietly asked how many knew Drakte. Nearly every hand went up. By the time she had quietly finished explaining that Drakte had been killed trying to help, there were no more arguments from the farmers and herders. They rose with grim determination and broke into groups as the purbas began explaining their plan.
The special medical team was still at Norbu, its technicians looking fatigued as they wandered out among the Tibetans. It meant that the manhunt for the medicine lama had not stopped, and was staying in the area. Why, Shan wondered? What evidence about Jokar kept them at the gompa? Surely if they had known his destination they would have not wasted so many weeks tracking him in the mountains from India.
Less than an hour after the letter was delivered, Tibetans began forming a line at the gate, some of them holding their abdomens, two purbas wearing arms in slings. The guard would not let them inside. They waited patiently, nearly an hour, before one of the men in the light blue uniforms noticed them and instructed the sentry to allow the sick Tibetans to enter, not noticing the single Han among them, wearing a dirty bandage on his hand and his new broad-brimmed hat pulled low around his forehead.
When he arrived at the rear of the compound, Shan was relieved to find none of the discipline he had seen on his first visit. A rope had been strung along on portable wooden posts outside the makeshift clinic, to shepherd the sick into a line. The medical team worked through the first few patients quickly, with an absent air, giving all of them some form of medication. Those released from the doctors milled about the rear of the compound, speaking with those in line, marveling over the large prayer wheel, even admiring the huge pile of yak dung, apparently untouched since Gyalo had left.
Shan and Nyma drifted away from the line and wandered toward the stable where they had been trapped on their first visit. They stopped at the stable and confirming that no one was watching, stepped into the adjacent structure as Shan slipped off his bandage. The low, decrepit wooden building was old, perhaps older than the stable. Its meditation cells, three on either side, and two at the back, were musty, the air stale. Shan remembered Gyalo saying that the gompa had only a third the number of monks it had been built for.
Of all the human-built places Shan had experienced in the extraordinary lands of Tibet none moved him more than the simple wooden cells he sometimes, rarely, discovered in the country's remote regions, in the few structures remaining from earlier centuries. Here men and women had sat through the centuries, engaged in exactly the same pursuit, with the same feelings, the same yearning for awareness that Shan and his Tibetan friends felt. He had awkwardly described to Gendun one of his first encounters with such a cell as visiting a time machine, for somehow he had sensed the presence of monks who had sat there, three or four hundred years before. But no, Gendun had said, not a time machine, for that implied too much difference between us and them, as if the centuries changed those who sought awareness. It was a bridge, he said, a way of stepping beyond time, eliminating time, reaching for the same plane of awareness that enlightened beings inhabited, without regard to time. He paused, remembering Gendun's words, and for an instant wanted nothing more than to sit and meditate in one of the cells.
"Jokar Rinpoche said it was from the time of the Sixth, when they came for him," Shan said, stepping past Nyma to the rear cells. He was still struggling to see through Jokar's words, still trying to separate those words meant for this world and those meant for another.
"Lhabzang Khan," Nyma said in a distracted tone as she stepped into one of the rear cells. She raised a finger and tentatively touched the old cedar, as if it might crumble. "Lhabzang Khan from Mongolia invaded Tibet and kidnapped the Sixth Dalai Lama. His army came through Amdo on the northern road."
It had been three hundred years earlier, Shan remembered, when the young Sixth had been kidnapped by the Mongolians, with the notion of presenting him as a gift to the Manchu emperor in Beijing. But the Mongols and the Chinese had been cheated when the Sixth had died en route to China.
"Places like Norbu, near the northern road, would have been looted," Shan said, and stepped into the second cell. He began pushing the rear wall along its edges. Nothing moved. He pressed his finger along the length of each seam in the planks. Nothing. No gap in the finely crafted construction. He stepped out of the cell and saw Nyma was doing the same in the first cell. "Someone could come," she said, nervously glancing over her shoulder.
He stepped into the cell with the nun. "Jokar," she sighed, "could just have been speaking about something he saw when meditating, a vision."
Shan nodded in disappointment. There was a little ledge made of two narrow planks built into the side of the cell, where a monk might place a butter lamp and incense burner. He ran his hands along the planks and under them. There was no lever, no switch hidden underneath, no place to hide anything. Finally he ran a finger along the top of the planks, lightly at first, then harder. As his hand approached the rear corner, the end of the back plank dropped half an inch, and the rear wall swung open.
It was a narrow space, no more than three feet wide. As they stepped inside Nyma lit a match. They had no candle, no butter lamp, no electric light. But they also had no time to linger. Nyma extended the match in one direction, then the other. The musty closet ran for twenty feet. At one end was a bench, on which cushions were stacked, at the other shelves.
They had no time to look further. Nyma blew out the match and stepped back into the cell with Shan. He pushed the opposite, raised end of the trigger plank and the rear wall groaned softly and settled back into place, the plank snapping back into position.
Outside, several dropka were turning the huge prayer wheel. An excited dropka asked a passing monk if they could keep turning it past the posted hours, in honor of the holiday. The monk nervously replied he would relay the request to the Committee.
As he walked back around the compound Shan realized there was no sign of the Committee, no sign of Khodrak or Padme. No sign of Tuan. Despite the glimmer of hope he had felt when Lin's letter had been delivered, it now seemed impossible that Tenzin and Lokesh could be there, that the presence of an important prisoner like Tenzin would not be evidenced somewhere in the gompa. There could be other places, he realized in despair, secret places the purbas did not know. The guard at the gate could be there simply because of all the Tibetans camped outside the gompa.